Eat your cake--stay skinny too

There’s something about layer cakes that I just can’t resist. Sure, those homey sheet cakes taste good, but a layer cake is
cause for real celebration. And I love banana in any dessert recipe.

Many banana cake recipes are a butter-and-cream bonanza with just a bit of banana. Luckily this yummy cake already has a
jump-start on being healthy. Bananas are one of the best dietary sources of potassium. So we set out to develop a banana cake
recipe that kept the healthy ingredients and cut or reduced the less healthy ones to yield a cake that is low in cholesterol
and sodium. Many of the
healthier cooking tricks we used can be applied to other healthy cake recipes.

* Increased the bananas, which helped keep it moist and rich after we cut the fat.

* Replaced the butter with a smaller amount of canola oil.

* We used whole-wheat pastry flour in place of some of the white flour. Higher in trace minerals than white flour, it
contains as much of the fiber-rich bran and germ as regular whole-wheat flour.

* We reduced the amount of whipped cream—the second-highest contributor of saturated fat in the recipe—by stirring together a
thick, stable base of nonfat milk, sugar and gelatin and then folding in half as much whipped cream.

The resulting banana cake is only 300 calories
per serving and is so delicious it was gone in a matter of minutes from our test kitchen.